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THE BONDBOY
* * * * *
_By G. W. Ogden_
Trail's End
Claim Number One
The Land of Last Chance
The Rustler of Wind River
The Duke of Chimney Butte
The Flockmaster of Poison Creek
* * * * *
THE BONDBOY
by
GEORGE W. OGDEN
Chicago
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1922
Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1922
Published October, 1922
Copyrighted in Great Britain
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
I. Delivered Into Bondage 1
II. A Dry-Salt Man 21
III. The Spark in the Clod 47
IV. A Stranger at the Gate 66
V. The Secret of the Clover 84
VI. Blood 99
VII. Deliverance 114
VIII. Will He Tell? 126
IX. The Sealed Envelope 152
X. Let Him Hang 166
XI. Peter's Son 171
XII. The Sunbeam on the Wall 188
XIII. Until the Day Break 210
XIV. Deserted 228
XV. The State vs. Newbolt 241
XVI. "She Cometh Not" He Said 249
XVII. The Blow of a Friend 259
XVIII. A Name and a Message 276
XIX. The Shadow of a Dream 304
XX. "The Penalty Is Death!" 311
XXI. Ollie Speaks 325
XXII. A Summons of the Night 341
XXIII. Lest I Forget 359
The Bondboy
CHAPTER I
DELIVERED INTO BONDAGE
Sarah Newbolt enjoyed in her saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April
sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to
soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen
wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the
lilacs, which clustered coppicelike in her dooryard, were ready to
unlock and flare forth leaves. On the porch with its southern exposure
she sat in her low, splint-bottomed rocker, leaning forward, her elbows
on her knees.
The sun tickled her shoulders through her linsey dress, and pictured
her, grotesquely foreshortened, upon the nail-drawn, warped, and beaten
floor. Her hands, nursing her cheeks, chin pivoted in their palms, were
large and toil-distorted, great-jointed like a man's, and all the
feminine softness with which nature had endowed her seemed to have been
overcome by the masculine cast of frame and face which the hardships of
her life had developed.
She did not seem, crouched there like an old cat warming herself in the
first keen fires of spring, conscious of anything about her; of the low
house, with its battered eaves, the sprawling rail-fence in front of it,
out of which the gate was gone, like a tooth; of the wild bramble of
roses, or the generations of honeysuckle which had grown, layer upon
layer--the under stratum all dead and brown--over the decaying arbor
which led up to the cracked front door. She did not seem conscious that
time and poverty had wasted the beauties of that place; that shingles
were gone from the outreaching eaves, torn away by March winds; that
stones had fallen from the chimney, squatting broad-shouldered at the
weathered gable; that panes were missing from the windows, their places
supplied by boards and tacked-on cloth, or that pillows crowded into
them, making it seem a house that stopped its ears against the
unfriendly things which passengers upon the highway might speak of it.
Time and poverty were pressing upon Sarah Newbolt also, relaxing there
that bright hour in the sun, straying away from her troubles and her
vexations like an autumn butterfly among the golden leaves, unmindful of
the frost which soon must cut short its day. For, poor as she was in all
that governments put imposts upon, and men list in tax returns and carry
to steel vaults to hoard away, Sarah Newbolt had her dreams. She had no
golden past; there was no golden future ready before her feet. There was
no review for her in those visions of happy days and tender memories,
over which a woman half closes her eyes and smiles, or over the incense
of which a man's heart softens. Behind her stretched a wake of
turbulence and strife; ahead of her lay the banked clouds of an
unsettled and insecure future.
But she had her dreams, in which even the poorest of us may indulge when
our taskmaster in the great brickworks of this hot and heavy world is
not hard by and pressing us forward with his lash. She had her dreams of
what never was and never could be; of old longings, old heart-hungers,
old hopes, and loves which never had come near for one moment's caress
of her toil-hardened hand. Dreams which roved the world and soothed the
ache in her heart by their very extravagance, which even her frugal
conscience could not chide; dreams which drew hot tears upon her cheeks,
to trickle down among her knotted fingers and tincture the bitterness of
things unrealized.
The crunch of wheels in the road now startled her from her profitless
excursions among the mist of visions and dreams. She lifted her head
like a cow startled from her peaceful grazing, for the vehicle had
stopped at the gap in the fence where the gate should have stood warder
between its leaning posts.
"Well, he's come," said she with the resignation of one who finds the
long expected and dreaded at hand.
A man got out of the buggy and hitched his horse to one of the old
gate-posts, first trying it to satisfy himself that it was trustworthy,
for stability in even a post on those premises, where everything was
going to decay, seemed unreasonable to expect. He turned up the path,
bordered by blue flags, thrusting their swordpoints through the ground,
and strode toward the house, with that uncouth giving at the knees which
marks a man who long has followed the plow across furrowed fields.
The visitor was tall and bony, brown, dry-faced, and frowning of aspect.
There was severity in every line of his long, loose body; in the hard
wrinkles of his forehead, in his ill-nurtured gray beard, which was so
harsh that it rasped like wire upon his coat as he turned his head in
quick appraisement of his surroundings. His feet were bunion-distorted
and lumpy in his great coarse shoes; coarse black hair grew down upon
his broad, thick-jointed hands; a thicket of eyebrows presented, like a
_chevaux-de-frise_, bristling when he drew them down in his peering
squint.
Sarah Newbolt rose to meet him, tall in the vigor of her pioneer stock.
In her face there was a malarial smokiness of color, although it still
held a trace of a past brightness, and her meagerness of feature gave
her mouth a set of determination which stood like a false index at the
beginning of a book or a misleading sign upon a door. Her eyes were
black, her brows small and delicate. Back from her narrow forehead she
had drawn her plentiful dark hair in rigid unloveliness; over it she
wore a knitted shawl.
"Well, Mr. Chase, you've come to put us out, I reckon?" said she, a
little tremor in her chin, although her voice was steady and her eyes
met his with an appeal which lay too near the soul for words.
Isom Chase drew up to the steps and placed one knotted foot upon them,
standing thus in silence a little while, as if thinking it over. The
dust of the highroad was on his broad black hat, and gray upon his
grizzly beard. In the attitude of his lean frame, in the posture of his
foot upon the step, he seemed to be asserting a mastery over the place
which he had invaded to the sad dispersion of Sarah Newbolt's dreams.
"I hate to do it," he declared, speaking hurriedly, as if he held words
but frail vehicles in a world where deeds counted with so much greater
weight, "but I've been easy on you, ma'am; no man can say that I haven't
been easy."
"I know your money's long past due," she sighed, "but if you was to give
Joe another chance, Mr. Chase, we could pay you off in time."
"Oh, another chance, another chance!" said he impatiently. "What could
you do with all the chances in the world, you and him--what did your
husband ever do with his chances? He had as many of 'em as I ever did,
and what did he ever do but scheme away his time on fool things that
didn't pan out when he ought 'a' been in the field! No, you and Joe
couldn't pay back that loan, ma'am, not if I was to give you forty years
to do it in."
"Well, maybe not," said she, drawing a sigh from the well of her sad old
heart.
"The interest ain't been paid since Peter died, and that's more than two
years now," said Chase. "I can't sleep on my rights that way, ma'am;
I've got to foreclose to save myself."
"Yes, you've been easy, even if we did give you up our last cow on that
there inter-est," she allowed. "You've been as kind and easy over it, I
reckon, Mr. Chase, as a body could be. Well, I reckon me and Joe we'll
have to leave the old place now."
"Lord knows, I don't see what there is to stay for!" said Chase feelingly,
sweeping his eyes around the wired-up, gone-to-the-devil-looking place.
"When a body's bore children in a place," she said earnestly, "and
nussed 'em, and seen 'em fade away and die; and when a body's lived in a
house for upward of forty years, and thought things in it, and
everything----"
"Bosh!" said Isom Chase, kicking the rotting step.
"I know it's all shacklety now," said she apologetically, "but it's home
to me and Joe!"
Her voice trembled over the words, and she wiped her eyes with the
corner of her head-shawl; but her face remained as immobile as features
cast in metal. When one has wept out of the heart for years, as Sarah
Newbolt had wept, the face is no longer a barometer over the tempests of
the soul.
Isom Chase was silent. He stood as if reflecting his coming words,
trying the loose boards of the siding with his blunt thumb.
"Peter and I, we came here from Kentucky," said she, looking at him with
a sidelong appeal, as if for permission to speak the profitless
sentiments of her heart, "and people was scarce in this part of Missouri
then. I rode all the way a-horseback, and I came here, to this very
house, a bride."
"I didn't take a mortgage on sentiment--I took it on the land," said
Chase, out of humor with this reminiscent history.
"You can't understand how I feel, Mr. Chase," said she, dropping her
arms at her sides hopelessly. "Peter--he planted them laylocks and them
roses."
"Better 'a' planted corn--and tended to it!" grunted Chase. "Well, you
can grub 'em all up and take 'em away with you, if you want 'em. They
don't pay interest--I suppose you've found that out."
"Not on money," said she, reaching out her hand toward a giant lilac
with a caressing, tender air.
"Sit down," said he in voice of command, planting himself upon the
porch, his back against a post, "and let's you and I have a little talk.
Where do you expect to go when you leave here; what plans have you got
for the future?"
"Lord, there's not a clap-board in this world that I can poke my head
under and lay claim to its shelter!" said she, sitting again in her low
rocker, shaking her head sadly.
"Your boy Joe, he'll not be able to command man's wages for three or
four years yet," said Chase, studying her averted face as if to take
possession of even her thoughts. "He'll not be able to do much toward
supportin' you, even if he could light on to a steady, all-the-year job,
which he can't, the way times is."
"No, I don't reckon he could," said she.
"And if I was to let you two stay on here I wouldn't be any nearer bein'
paid back that four hundred dollar loan in two or three years than I am
now. It's nearly five hundred now, with the interest pilin' up, and
it'll be a thousand before you know it. It'd take that boy a lifetime to
pay it off."
"Peter failed," she nodded; "it was a burden on him that hackled him to
the grave. Yes, I reckon you're right. But there's no tellin' how Joe
he'll turn out, Mr. Chase. He may turn out to be a better manager than
his pap was."
"How old is he?" asked Chase.
"Most nineteen," said she, some kind of a faraway hope, indefinable and
hazy, lifting the cloud of depression which had fallen over her, "and
he's uncommon big and stout for his age. Maybe if you'd give Joe work he
could pay it off, interest and all, by the time he's twenty-one."
"Not much need for him," said Chase, shaking his head, "but I
might--well, I might figure around so I could take him over, on certain
conditions, you understand? It all depends on your plans. If you haven't
anywhere to go when you leave this house, you're bound to land on the
county."
"Don't tell me that, Mr. Chase--don't tell me that!" she begged,
pressing her battered hands to her eyes, rocking and moaning in her
chair.
"What's the use of puttin' the truth back of you when you're bound to
come face up to it in the end?" he asked. "I was talkin' to Judge
Little, of the county court, about you this morning. I told him I'd have
to foreclose and take possession of this forty to save myself.
"'It'll throw her and that boy on the county,' he says. 'Yes, I reckon
it will,' I told him, 'but no man can say I've been hard on 'em.'"
"Oh, you wouldn't throw me on the county at the end of my days, Mr.
Chase!" she appealed. "Joe he'll take care of me, if you'll only give
him a chance--if you'll only give him a chance, Mr. Chase!"
"I meant to take that up with you," said he, "on the conditions I spoke
of a minute ago."
He turned to her, as if for her consent to give expression to his
mysterious terms. She nodded, and he went on:
"In the winter time, ma'am, to tell you the plain truth, Joe wouldn't be
worth wages to me, and in the summer not very much. A boy that size and
age eats his head off, you might say.
"But I'll make you this offer, out of consideration of my friendship for
Peter, and your attachment for the old place, and all of that stuff:
I'll take Joe over, under writing, till he's twenty-one, at ten dollars
a month and all found, winter and summer through, and allow you to stay
right on here in the house, with a couple of acres for your chickens and
garden patch and your posies and all the things you set store on and
prize. I'll do this for you, Missis Newbolt, but I wouldn't do it for
any other human being alive."
She turned slowly to him, an expression of mingled amazement and fear on
her face.
"You mean that you want me to bind Joe out to you till he's his own
man?" said she.
"Well, some call it by that name," nodded Chase, "but it's nothing more
than any apprenticeship to any trade, except--oh, well, there ain't no
difference, except that there's few trades that equal the one the boy'll
learn under me, ma'am."
"You're askin' me to bind my little son--my only child left to me of all
that I bore--you want me to bind him out to you like a nigger slave!"
Her voice fell away to a whisper, unable to bear the horror that grew
into her words.
"Better boys than him have been bound out in this neighborhood!" said
Chase sharply. "If you don't want to do it, _don't_ do it. That's all
I've got to say. If you'd rather go to the poorhouse than see your son
in steady and honorable employment, in a good home, and learning a
business under a man that's made some success of it, that's your
lookout, not mine. But that's where you'll land the minute you set your
foot out in that road. Then the county court'll take your boy and bind
him out to somebody, and you'll have no word to say in the matter, at
all. But you can suit yourself."
"It--kind of--shook me," she muttered, the mother-love, the honor and
justice in her quailing heart shrinking back before the threat of that
terrible disgrace--the poorhouse.
The shadow of the poorhouse had stood in her way for years. It had been
the fear of Peter when he was there, and his last word was one of
thankfulness to the Almighty that he had been permitted to die in a
freeman's bed, under his own humble roof. That consolation was to be
denied her; the shadow of the poorhouse had advanced until it stood now
at her door. One step and it would envelop her; the taint of its blight
would wither her heart.
Sarah Newbolt had inherited that dread of publicly confessed poverty and
dependence. It had come down to her through a long line of pioneer
forebears who feared neither hardship, strife nor death, so that it
might come to them without a master and under the free sky. Only the
disgraced, the disowned, the failures, and the broken-minded made an end
in the poorhouse in those vigorous days. It was a disgrace from which a
family never could hope to rise again. There, on the old farm with Peter
she had been poor, as poor as the poorest, but they had been free to
come and go.
"I know I've got the name of being a hard man and a money-grabber and a
driver," said Chase with crabbed bitterness, "but who is it that gives
that reputation to me? People that can't beat me and take advantage of
me and work money out of me by their rascally schemes! I'm not a hard
man by nature--my actions with you prove that, don't they?"
"You've been as kind as a body could expect," she answered. "It's only
right that you should have your money back, and it ain't been your fault
that we couldn't raise it. But we've done the best we could."
"And that best only led you up to the poorhouse door," said he. "I'm
offering you a way to escape it, and spend the rest of your days in the
place you're attached to, but I don't seem to get any thanks for it."
"I am thankful to you for your offer--from the bottom of my heart I'm
thankful, Mr. Chase," she hastened to declare.
"Well, neither of us knows how Joe's going to turn out," said he. "Under
my training he might develop into a good, sober farmer, one that knows
his business and can make it pay. If he does, I promise you I'll give
him a chance on this place to redeem it. I'll put him on it to farm on
shares when he fills out his time under me, my share of the crops to
apply to the debt. Would that be fair?"
"Nobody in this world couldn't say it wasn't generous and fair of you,
and noble and kind, Mr. Chase," she declared, her face showing a little
color, the courage coming back into her eyes.
"Then you'd better take up my offer without any more foolishness," he
advised.
"I'll have to talk it over with Joe," said she.
"He's got nothing to do with it, I tell you," protested Chase, brushing
that phase of it aside with a sweep of his hairy hand. "You, and you
alone, are responsible for him till he's twenty-one, and it's your duty
to keep him off the county and away from the disgrace of pauperism, and
yourself as well."
"I ought to see Joe about it first, Mr. Chase, I ought to talk it over
with him. Let me think a minute."
She settled down to her pensive attitude, elbows on knees, chin in
hands, and looked over the homely scene of riotous shrubbery, racked
buildings, leaning well-curb, rotting fences. In one swift, painful
moment she pictured what that spot would be after Isom Chase had taken
possession.
He would uproot the lilacs; he would level the house and the chimney,
stone by stone; he would fill up the well and pull down the old barn
that Peter built, and drive his plow over the hearthstone where she had
suckled her babies in the years of her youth and hope. He would
obliterate the landmarks of her bridal days, and sow his grain in the
spot where Peter, fresh in the strong heat of youth, had anchored their
ambitions.
It was not so much for what it had been that her heart was tender to it,
for the years had been heavy there and toilsome, disappointing and full
of pain; not so much for what it had been, indeed, as what she and young
Peter, with the thick black hair upon his brow, had planned to make it.
It was for the romance unlived, the hope unrealized, that it was dear.
And then again it was poor and pitiful, wind-shaken and old, but it was
home. The thought of the desolation that waited it in the dread future
struck her breast like the pangs of bereavement. Tears coursed down her
face; sobs rose in her aching throat.
Joe, she thought, would do that much for her and the old home place; it
would be but a little more than two years of sacrifice for him, at the
most, with the bright hope of independence and redemption at the end.
Being bound out would not be so disgraceful as going to the poorhouse.
Joe would do it for her, she was sure of that. But it would be better to
wait until evening and ask him.
"Joe, he'll be along home from his work about dusk," said she, "and we
could let you know tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," said Isom Chase, rising stiffly, "I'll have to send the
sheriff here with the papers. Tomorrow, ma'am, will be too late."
That dreadful picture swept across her inner vision once more--the
chimney down, the house gone. She saw corn growing over the spot where
she sat that moment; she remembered that Isom Chase had plowed up a
burying-ground once and seeded it to timothy.
"What will I have to do to bind Joe over to you?" she asked, facing him
in sudden resolution.
"We'll git in the buggy," said he, with new friendliness, seeing that he
had won, "and drive over to Judge Little's. He can make out the papers
in a few minutes, and I'll pay you a month's wages in advance. That will
fix you up for groceries and garden seeds and everything, and you'll be
as snug and happy as any woman in the county."
In less than two hours the transaction was completed, and Sarah Newbolt
was back again in the home upon which she had secured her slipping
tenure at the sacrifice of her son's liberty. As she began "stirring the
pots for supper," as she called it, she also had time to stir the deep
waters of reflection.
She had secured herself from the threat of the county farm, and Joe had
been the price; Joe, her last-born, the sole remaining one of the six
who had come to her and gone on again into the mists.
She began to fear in her heart when she stood off and viewed the result
of her desperate panic, the pangs of which Isom Chase had adroitly
magnified. If Joe could work for Isom Chase and thus keep her from the
poorhouse, could he not have worked for another, free to come and go as
he liked, and with the same security for her?
Chase said that he had not taken a mortgage on sentiment, but he had
made capital out of it in the end, trading upon her affection for the
old home and its years-long associations. As the gloomy evening deepened
and she stood in the door watching for her son's return, she saw through
the scheme of Isom Chase. She never would have been thrown on the county
with Joe to depend on; the question of his ability to support both of
them admitted of no debate.
Joe's industry spoke for that, and that was Isom Chase's reason for
wanting him. Isom wanted him because he was strong and trustworthy,
honest and faithful. And she had bargained him in selfishness and sold
him in cowardice, without a word from him, as she might have sold a cow
to pay a pressing debt.
The bargain was binding. Judge Little had pressed that understanding of
it upon her. It was as irrevocable as a deed signed and sealed. Joe
could not break it; she could not set it aside. Isom Chase was empowered
with all the authority of absolute master.
"If he does anything that deserves thrashing for, I've got a right to
thrash him, do you understand that?" Isom had said as he stood there in
the presence of Judge Little, buttoning his coat over the document which
transferred Joe's services to him.
Her heart had contracted at the words, for the cruelty of Isom Chase was
notorious. A bound boy had died in his service not many years before,
kicked by a mule, it was said. There had been mutterings at that time,
and talk of an investigation, which never came to a head because the
bound lad was nobody, taken out of the county home. But the fear in the
widow's heart that moment was not for her son; it was for Isom Chase.
"Lord 'a' mercy, Mr. Chase, you mustn't never strike Joe!" she warned.
"You don't know what kind of a boy he is, Mr. Chase. I'm afraid he might
up and hurt you maybe, if you ever done that."
"I'll handle him in my own way," with portentous significance; "but I
want you to understand my rights fully at the start."
"Yes, sir," she answered meekly.
Joe was coming now, pitchfork over his shoulder, from the field where he
had been burning corn-stalks, making ready for the plow. She hastened to
set out a basin of water on the bench beside the kitchen door, and
turned then into the room to light the lamp and place it on the waiting
table.
Joe appeared at the door, drying his hands on the dangling towel. He was
a tall, gaunt-faced boy, big-boned, raw-jointed, the framework for
prodigious strength. His shoulders all but filled the narrow doorway,
his crown came within an inch of its lintel. His face was glowing from
the scrubbing which he had given it with home-made lye soap, his
drenched hair fell in heavy locks down his deep forehead.
"Well, Mother, what's happened?" he asked, noting her uneasiness as she
sat waiting him at the table, the steaming coffee-pot at her hand.
"Sit down and start your supper, son, and we'll talk as we go along,"
said she.
Joe gave his hair a "lick and a promise" with the comb, and took his
place at the table. Mrs. Newbolt bent her head and pronounced the
thanksgiving which that humble board never lacked, and she drew it out
to an amazing and uncomfortable length that evening, as Joe's impatient
stomach could bear clamorous witness.
Sarah Newbolt had a wide fame as a religious woman, and a woman who
could get more hell-fire into her belief and more melancholy pleasure
out of it than any hard-shell preacher in the land. It was a doleful
religion, with little promise or hope in it, and a great deal of blood
and suffering between the world and its doubtful reward; but Sarah
Newbolt lived according to its stern inflexibility, and sang its
sorrowful hymns by day, as she moved about the house, in a voice that
carried a mile. But for all the grimness in her creed, there was not a
being alive with a softer heart. She would have divided her last square
of corn-bread with the wayfarer at her door, without question of his
worth or unworthiness, his dissension, or his faith.
"Mr. Chase was here this afternoon, Joe," said she as the lad began his
supper.
"Well, I suppose he's going to put us out?"
Joe paused in the mixing of gravy and corn-bread--designed to be
conveyed to his mouth on the blade of his knife--and lifted inquiring
eyes to his mother's troubled face.
"No, son; we fixed it up," said she.
"You fixed it up?" he repeated, his eyes beaming with pleasure. "Is he
going to give us another chance?"
"You go on and eat your supper, Joe; we'll talk it over when you're
through. Lands, you must be tired and hungry after workin' so hard all
afternoon!"
He was too hungry, perhaps, to be greatly troubled by her air of
uneasiness and distraction. He bent over his plate, not noting that she
sipped her coffee with a spoon, touching no food. At last he pushed back
with a sigh of repletion, and smiled across at his mother.
"So you fixed it up with him?"
"Yes, I went into a dishonorable deal with Isom Chase," said she, "and I
don't know what you'll say when you hear what's to be told to you,
Joe."
"What do you mean by 'dishonorable deal'?" he asked, his face growing
white.
"I don't know what you'll say, Joe, I don't know what you'll say!"
moaned she, shaking her head sorrowfully.
"Well, Mother, I can't make out what you mean," said he, baffled and
mystified by her strange behavior.
"Wait--I'll show you."
She rose from the table and reached down a folded paper from among the
soda packages and tins on the shelf. Saying no more, she handed it to
him. Joe took it, wonder in his face, spread his elbows, and unfolded
the document with its notarial seal.
Joe was ready at printed matter. He read fast and understandingly, and
his face grew paler as his eyes ran on from line to line. When he came
to the end, where his mother's wavering signature stood above that of
Isom Chase, his head dropped a little lower, his hands lay listlessly,
as if paralyzed, on the paper under his eyes. A sudden dejection seemed
to settle over him, blighting his youth and buoyancy.
Mrs. Newbolt was making out to be busy over the stove. She lifted the
lid of the kettle, and put it down with a clatter; she opened the stove
and rammed the fire with needless severity with the poker, and it
snapped back at her, shooting sparks against her hand.
"Mother, you've bound me out!" said he, his voice unsteady in its
accusing note.
She looked at him, her hands starting out in a little movement of
appeal. He turned from the table and sat very straight and stern in his
chair, his gaunt face hollowed in shadows, his wild hair falling across
his brow.
"Oh, I sold you! I sold you!" she wailed.
She sat again in her place at the table, spiritless and afraid, her
hands limp in her lap.
"You've bound me out!" Joe repeated harshly, his voice rasping in his
throat.
"I never meant to do it, Joe," she pleaded in weak defense; "but Isom,
he said nothing else would save us from the county farm. I wanted to
wait and ask you, Joe, and I told him I wanted to ask you, but he said
it would be too late!"
"Yes. What else did he say?" asked Joe, his hands clenched, his eyes
peering straight ahead at the wall.
She related the circumstances of Chase's visit, his threat of eviction,
his declaration that she would become a county charge the moment that
she set foot in the road.
"The old liar!" said Joe.
There seemed to be nothing more for her to say. She could make no
defense of an act which stood before her in all its ugly selfishness.
Joe sat still, staring at the wall beyond the stove; she crouched
forward in her chair, as if to shrink out of his sight.
Between them the little glass lamp stood, a droning, slow-winged brown
beetle blundering against its chimney. Outside, the distant chant of
newly wakened frogs sounded; through the open door the warm air of the
April night came straying, bearing the incense of the fields and
woodlands, where fires smoldered like sleepers sending forth their
dreams.
His silence was to her the heaviest rebuke that he could have
administered. Her remorse gathered under it, her contrition broke its
bounds.
"Oh, I sold you, my own flesh and blood!" she cried, springing to her
feet, lifting her long arms above her head.
"You knew what he was, Mother; you knew what it meant to be bound out to
him for two long years and more. It wasn't as if you didn't know."
"I knew, I knew! But I done it, son, I done it! And I done it to save my
own mis'able self. I ain't got no excuse, Joe, I ain't got no excuse at
all."
"Well, Mother, you'll be safe here, anyhow, and I can stand it," said
Joe, brightening a little, the tense severity of his face softening.
"Never mind; I can stand it, I guess."
"I'll never let you go to him--I didn't mean to do it--it wasn't fair
the way he drove me into it!" said she.
She laid her hand, almost timidly, on her son's shoulder, and looked
into his face. "I know you could take care of me and keep off of the
county, even if Isom did put us out like he said he'd do, but I went and
done it, anyhow. Isom led me into it, Joe; he wasn't fair."
"Yes, and you bound me out for about half what I'm worth to any man and
could demand for my services anywhere, Mother," said Joe, the bitterness
which he had fought down but a moment past surging up in him again.
"Lord forgive me!" she supplicated piteously. She turned suddenly to the
table and snatched the paper. "It wasn't fair--he fooled me into it!"
she repeated. "I'll tear it up, I'll burn it, and we'll leave this place
and let him have it, and he can go on and do whatever he wants to with
it--tear it down, burn it, knock it to pieces--for anything I care
now!"
Joe restrained her as she went toward the stove, the document in her
hand.
"Wait, Mother; it's a bargain. We're bound in honor to it, we can't back
down now."
"I'll never let you do it!" she declared, her voice rising beyond her
control. "I'll walk the roads and beg my bread first! I'll hoe in the
fields, I'll wash folks' clothes for 'em like a nigger slave, I'll lay
down my life, Joe, before I let you go into that murderin' man's
hands!"
He took the paper from her hands gently.
"I've been thinking it over, Mother," said he, "and it might be
worse--it might be a good deal worse. It gives me steady work, for one
thing, and you can save most of my wages, counting on the eggs you'll
sell, and the few turkeys and things. After a while you can get a cow
and make butter, and we'll be better off, all around. We couldn't get
out of it, anyway, Mother. He's paid you money, and you've signed your
name to the contract along with Isom. If we were to pull out and leave
here, Isom could send the sheriff after me and bring me back, I guess.
Even if he couldn't do that, he could sue you, Mother, and make no end
of trouble. But we wouldn't leave if we could. It wouldn't be quite
honorable, or like Newbolts at all, to break our contract that way."
"But he'll drive you to the grave, Joe!"
A slow smile spread over his face. "I don't think Isom would find me a
good driving horse," said he.
"He said if you done well," she told him, brightening as she clutched at
that small stay of justification, "he'd let you work this place on
shares till you paid off the loan. That was one reason----"
"Of course," said Joe, a cheerfulness in his voice which his pale cheeks
did not sustain, "that was one thing I had in mind when I spoke. It'll
all come out right. You've done the wisest thing there was to be done,
Mother, and I'll fulfill your agreement to the last day."
"You're a brave boy, Joe; you're a credit to the memory of your pap,"
said she.
"I'll go over to Isom's early in the morning," said Joe, quite
sprightly, as if the arrangement had indeed solved all their troubles.
He stretched his arms with a prodigious yawn. "You don't need to bother
about getting up and fixing breakfast for me, for I'll get some over
there."
"I hope he'll give you enough," said she.
"Don't you worry over me," he counseled kindly, "for I'll be all right
at Isom's. Sunday I'll come home and see you. Now, you take a good sleep
in the morning and don't bother."
"I'll be up before you leave," said she, her eyes overflowing with
tears. "Do you reckon I could lie and sleep and slumber when my last and
only livin' one's goin' away to become a servant in the house of
bondage? And I sold you to it, Joe, my own flesh and blood!"
There had been little tenderness between them all their days, for in
such lives of striving, poverty too often starves affection until it
quits the board. But there was a certain nobility of loyalty which
outlived the narrowness of their lot, and certain traditions of chivalry
in the Newbolt heritage which now guided Joe's hand to his mother's head
as she sat weeping and moaning with her arms flung upon the disordered
table.
"It'll be all right, Mother," he cheered her, "and the time will soon
pass away. What are two years to me? Not much more than a month or two
to an old man like Isom. I tell you, this plan's the finest thing in the
world for you and me, Mother--don't you grieve over it that way."
She was feeling the comfort of his cheerfulness when he left her to go
to bed, although she was sore in conscience and spirit, sore in mind and
heart.
"The Lord never gave any woman a son like him," said she as the sound of
Joe's steps fell quiet overhead, "and I've sold him into slavery and
bondage, just to save my own unworthy, coward'y, sneakin' self!"